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Brian SFlag for United States of America

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need to create a raid of zfs disk array

I currently just have an iMac but what I'd like to do is create a redundant disk array that is boot-able and or store date with a Unix kind of "discretionary access control"

I have used Carbon Copy and rsync to move data from disk to disk, but that is time consuming and error prone. Time Machine does meet the needs.

I had hoped Drobo would be a viable solution but it isn't boot-able, and I've heard about issues with their MacOS support.

The solution should be under $1000 and be expandable.
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mmconsultant
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did you mean zfs or hfs? zfs is not natively supported in the latest OS release of OS X.
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chrisribe

You can make a bootable Firewire hard drive using either Carbon Copy or DIsk Utility on the OS X install disk.  Then use another Firewire hard drive or a different partition on the bootable drive as a Time Machine disk.  If your internal hard drive fails, you can boot from the original clone (or the OS X install disk, for that matter) and restore your system from the Time Machine disk.  

 
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Yes, I meant ZFS, but it seems that support for that is dying due to licensing issues. ZFS has lots of wonder ideas and concepts built in to it, but I guess it is the Beta tape of the VHS wars...

And I meant to say that "Time Machine does *NOT* meet the needs." I have found time machine to have issues with recovery and restoring files -- it doesn't always back up what I want.

As for the round-robin booting swapping concept -- that too has human error built-in to it all over. I have tried in the past a 3 disk boot concept where the time machine backs up to a large drive and a cron job runs a batch rsync of the first bot disk to a 2nd disk. This is what I want to move out of. Even the MacPro does not offer RAID5 they too only mirror or stripe.
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mmconsultant
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NVM. I forgot about the bootable constraint. I'll let you know if I find something.
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